Mission Impossible

The Story: It was May of 2011... a few days after Lindsey Stirling and ThePianoGuys had each filmed their first official YouTube videos ("Spontaneous Me" and "Michael Meets Mozart"). Lindsey and Steven Sharp Nelson (cello guy) shared the stage at a concert. After the show they talked enthusiastically about a YouTube collaboration down the road. A year and a half and a million fan requests later and it's finally here! We love Lindsey Stirling! It feels like we're family -- we started on YouTube around the same time, we "grew up" in the same place, we all LOVE what we do and we're all REALLY good dancers...except for ThePianoGuys. =) We chose the theme from "Mission: Impossible" because we thought it would be a great music video to "be ourselves" in -- to play off each other, throw in some special effects, a couple "stunts," and some slapstick! The concept for the song and video began with spy gadgets -- we wanted all of them to be string instrument parts! Then how would we pair up graceful, pro-dancer Lindsey and not-so-graceful Steve? =) It was simple. Steve had to carry around his own chair! Then the graceful/not-so-graceful thing contrasted beautifully! When Jon Schmidt (Piano Guy) was cast as the "villain" and donned an eye patch we knew we were on to something... We composed this arrangement with the story of the video in mind -- a tense beginning building up the intrigue, a back-and-forth theme traded between violin and cello implying the partner-agent roles, lasers, the "reveal" moment of Jon, rappelling, and the hectic, scrambled ending. We wanted a little more thematic material to work with, so in addition to some original material, we merged Mission: Impossible with the first movement of Mozart's "Piano Sonata in C" (here's a recording of the original: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JcUh-g...). But, of course, we sped it up, transposed it into A minor and changed the time signature to 5/4! It became Jon's "villain theme." And yes, Jon is really pla